personal and professional musings from a Jesus-loving, center-right chica navigating life and faith in the ELCA ("takin' this bound conscience thing out for a test drive")

Friday, November 22, 2013

Confessions of an Incomplete Liturgical Nerd

True Confession: I’m a liturgy nerd.

I’m a sucker for good order, for letting
Scripture “dwell in me richly”, for the beauty of a chanted kyrie (even if I
can’t do it), and a reverent Eucharistic prayer that places Christ’s
inauguration of the New Covenant squarely in the context of God’s entire
salvation narrative beginning in Genesis, for a full-on cross-led procession in
and out of the service.I like this
stuff because I think it points to Jesus.I like it because it’s different,
and it reminds me that, as a Christian, I participate in a reality that is
simultaneously “not of this world” and also the most real of all
realities.I like the liturgy, and “high
church” because it’s the Sesame Street method of learning the faith – lex orandi, lex credendi, and when we
pray and sing and read the actual words
of Scripture, over and over and over again, we learn them, we marinate in
them, and the Word that goes out and does not return empty transforms us,
slowly, deeply, over time.I love the
old hymns.I love that they were written
by people with a deep faith and love for the Lord, and I love that they were
written to teach and defend the faith.“Of
the Father’s Love Begotten” is a beautiful, haunting, lovely, deep, rich hymn –
more so when you know that it was written in the 4th century at a
time when the debate about the quality of Jesus’ divinity was raging,
threatening to tear the Church apart.In
short, I believe in mystagogy.

I’ll be honest – I think that when we scale down or
eliminate altogether the depth and richness of our liturgical heritage, of our
hymnic tradition, of the Eucharistic celebration in favor of a couple
spontaneous prayers, a few songs that were mostly written for performance
rather than congregational singing, and a “message” (however orthodox and
well-delivered) given from a “stage”, we have lost a lot.

And I’ll continue to be honest – I think that a great many
congregations that make the decision to adopt this sort of “contemporary”
worship have done so in order to play to “what people want”, to take the easier
route of creating an “on-ramp” to the faith that never actually merges with the
rest of traffic rather than doing the (admittedly difficult) work of teaching
appreciation of the historic patterns and language of worship.That’s harsh, I know.

But.

True Confessions: I also love “contemporary Christian music.”My alarm clock is set to KLOVE, it was
Northwestern College’s radio stations that got me through seminary.My “fav” playlist on my iPod is chock full of
Lincoln Brewster and the Newsboys and Matt Maher and Brandon Heath and Sara
Groves and Moriah Peters.On Sunday
morning I want “Lead On, O King Eternal”, but on Saturday night, what’s wrong with
“How Many Kings?”

This is where my liturgical friends start to get antsy, I
think.CCM is so vapid, it’s so “emotive”,
the theology is crap, it’s impossible to sing congregationally, it’s all 7-11
songs, “worship leaders” perform like they’re at a concert rather than leading
others in worship of the Most High God, why do I feel like “Jesus is my
boyfriend”, it’s unsacramental, etc. I
get it.

These are all valid critiques.Every one of them.There is a lot of CCM out there that is
garbage, especially if you subscribe to a sacramental, non-Arminian version of
the Christian faith.It’s part of why I
don’t like CCM in worship – because it’s so
hard to find music that is theologically acceptable and congregationally-singable
– and even more so in smaller parishes with far less musical resources to
support using it in worship.Personally,
I’d be pretty happy if I went my whole career without ever having to deal with
that.

But.But, as a former
pastor used to say, “the organ is God’s favorite instrument never mentioned in
the Bible.”There’s something slightly
ironic about claiming to want the most ancient liturgies of the church revived –
and played on an organ.And even more
than that, is the fact that culturally, the organ is rapidly falling into disuse.Organs are expensive to buy (for new mission
start congregations) and expensive to maintain once you’ve got them. Organists are expensive to employ.Very few congregations can afford a
full-time, well-trained organist who can properly prepare for worship each
week.A goodly number of congregations
are “getting by” with the (admirable, dedicated often heroic) efforts of
near-volunteer musicians who serve the church as something of a moonlighting
opportunity.In no way do I wish to denigrate their service.Most of them are hard-working wonderful
people who love the Lord and love music and love serving their congregations in
this way.But most of them are also on
the far side of their midlife crisis, and in 10 or 20 or 30 years at best, they
will no longer be able to serve in this capacity.Fewer and fewer people are enrolling in “sacred
music” degree programs – the ones who do will have massive student loans to pay
once they graduate, loans which will require a better pay/benefits schedule
than many congregations can offer.It’s
chicken and egg, to be sure, but I don’t think that anybody has really come up
with a good long-term solution.

So what are we to do?To oversimplify, there’s nobody left to play the organ, and all the
non-organ music is crap.

But, of course, not all
non-organ music is crap.There’s
some that’s good.Virtually all of Matt
Maher ‘s work is fantastic.Stuart
Townsend rocks.Some of Chris Tomlin is good.Tenth Avenue North is usually pretty solid.But it’s
hard to get around the fact that if you’re from a sacramental (read: Lutheran, Roman
Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox) tradition there’s very little CCM that is
acceptable.Why is this?

I have a theory: my theory is that we (traditional,
liturgical, organ-loving worship nerds) have so wedded ourselves to Bach-ϋber-alles,
that we have effectively suppressed the potential gifts of our own congregants,
our own theologians, our own musicians.“Styles”
of music come and go – Gregorian chant sounds different than medieval choral
anthems which sound different than antebellum fiddle songs which sound
different than early 20th-century-jazz which sounds different than
Elvis which sounds different than hippie folk music which sounds different than…well,
you get the point.So it stands to
reason that modern-day writers and composers aren’t going to be coming up with
the next Beethoven symphony.They’d probably
write something that sounds more like Matt Redman than Charles Wesley.If we let them.

But do we shout down “contemporary” so loudly that our high school youth who love music but not so much Isaac Watts think that if they
wrote something that was Biblically and theologically sound we’d reject it out of
hand?

In recent years, I’ve really taken to Matt Maher.If you don’t know who he is, think of songs
like “Your Grace Is Enough”, “Christ is Risen,” and “Turn Around.”He’s a sensation on the Christian music
charts, he plays “modern-sounding” music that resonates with those less
enamored of Martin Luther or Ralph Vaughn Williams.And he is thoroughly Roman Catholic.Maher’s songs are drenched in Scripture and
liturgy, in the words of the daily offices and the wisdom of the saints.They are theologically rich, and avoid trite “Jesus
is my boyfriend” style clichés.They
open a new world of contemporary music to congregations who would like to use a
particular style without compromising orthodoxy, they provide words for individual
praise and prayer among the faithful.And in a CCM culture that tends toward deep suspicion of “pre-written
prayers” and sacramental traditions, especially Roman Catholicism, he has
steadily been making inroads and building friendships and showing that the RC
church isn’t scary, and it gets a lot more right than it gets wrong. So, yay, Matt Maher.

But it makes me ask – how many other “Matt Mahers” are out
there?How many grew-up-Lutheran (or RC
or Anglican) composers and lyricists have we pushed to non-denom
Baptist/Reformed circles because we explicitly and implicitly communicate that
any music less than 200 years old (theirs) is inherently inferior?

Once upon a time, the pipe organ was new.Once upon a time, Bach was but a gleam in his
father’s eye.Surely, because there is
nothing new under the sun, once upon a time somebody thought that “kids these
days” needed to stop trying to reinvent the wheel, when God hath so clearly
ordained the psalms for the purpose of corporate worship why do you need
anything different isn’t what we have good enough for you?

I’m not giving up on my homeboys, Watts and Wesley.But I love me some Matt Maher.Someday my congregation isn’t going to have
an organist (we only barely do now).So
how do we, who love and respect and honor the Tradition of the Church and the
sacred words and music it has given us, also find ways to lift up and honor the
gifts of today’s saints, as well?If God
has given them the gifts, then it must be because the Church has need of
them.What do we do with that?

About Me

I am a walking dialectic, so I suppose it's good that I'm a Lutheran. I'm into the Bible, geeky theology stuff, and staying up past my bedtime. I'm definitely "my own person" and I ask lots and lots of questions. I feel like I just wrote a personal ad.

Beautiful and Important

"The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross". ~ Colossians 1:15-20